Re:HelloSilicon – An introduction to assembly on Apple Silic...
by kitsunesoba on Sunday December 25, 2022 @02:54PM
(#34130605)
Windows is better than average but still has considerable holes in backwards compatibility that are particularly visible in games (and ironically, some of the worst are Microsoft's own games under the "Games for Windows" banner e.g. Fable 3), but I've seen a number of other random things break or stop working totally as expected when new versions of Windows come out.
This has two customers today:
- on x86 Macs only: older iOS Simulators
- on x86 and arm64 Macs: x86_32 code segments (no syscall emu), for Wine to be able to run 32-bit x86 applications.
I think that the fragile base class problem might be what made Apple get rid of 32-bit x86 app compatibility at the end.
> A lot of hardware didn't get new drivers either, and macOS went and changed that around too
Yeah. KM drivers aren't exactly the most stable thing from release to release ever on macOS. And Apple has been steadily getting rid of those.
The player that actually cares the most about backwards compatibility on the desktop to an insane extent is Microsoft. 32-bit Windows editions (that are able to run 16-bit apps) are only gone in Windows 11. Apple still spends a lot of effort on it but not to the same extent at all.